


cold was the night and hard was the ground

by danishsweethearts



Series: death defying acts [3]
Category: Batman - All Media Types, DCU
Genre: Gen, Late Night Conversations, tired boys bein tired
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-22
Updated: 2020-10-22
Packaged: 2021-03-09 04:01:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,443
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27147721
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/danishsweethearts/pseuds/danishsweethearts
Summary: Laundromats are save points.
Relationships: Dick Grayson & Wally West
Series: death defying acts [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1866133
Comments: 28
Kudos: 130
Collections: Dick & The Titans, everybody loves dick





	cold was the night and hard was the ground

**Author's Note:**

> so i'm in the throes of my creative writing capstone right now which is why this is written so fucking weirdly i have forgotten how to write normally. i hope u enjoy nonetheless. if u dont... i dont actually care this is my account

Set the scene. White chrome. Silver surfaces. The quiet hum of yellow lights; one, there, in the furthest corner, flickers every five minutes, with such accuracy you could time a clock to it.

It’s the dead of night.

Set the scene again. No, don’t change it, recontextualise it. There are two boys in a laundromat. The person working behind the counter looks like the exact dazed, stretched-thin university student you’d expect to be working at a 24 hour laundromat, but they aren’t the main character here. They barely look up when the two boys enter.

The first boy has red hair and long legs; he’s in the sweatshirt of a university located several states over, but he looks like he knows this place. The second is swaddled up in a hoodie a size or two too big for him, with black hair and tired eyes peeking out from under the hood.

The first boy says something, and the second boy rolls his eyes. There’s a grin hidden somewhere there, behind the layers of exhaustion and fabric. 

“I can’t believe you didn’t have enough change for  _ laundry,” _ Wally says, lifting himself up onto one of the washing machines. He makes himself comfortable. Patrons are strictly not allowed to sit on any of the machines, and in the absence of protest from the employee, there’s a big sign taped onto the wall that should suffice as warning.

It doesn’t.

“I forgot I gave all my coins to Lian so she could put them in one of those funnel things at the mall,” replies Dick.

Suffice, that is. It’s expeditiously ignored by not only Wally, but Dick, who lifts himself up onto the row of machines next to Wally, and then goes so far as to lie down.

Wally snorts. “You spoil her so much,”

Dick shrugs as best as he can. Grins. Some awkward shuffling commences. Dick, succesfully having wormed his way closer to Wally, places his head on his friend’s thigh.

Alright, set the scene, one last time. Get it right this time. It’s approximately four am, Dick’s approximately a day and a half away from running out of clean clothes, and it’s been approximately the worst night of his life. Patrol sucks. New York after dark (and most other hours of the day as well) is exhausting. The laundry machines at his apartment complex have all been damaged by minor flooding. 

Having to walk his basket of laundry two blocks down to the closest laundromat was inconveniencing. Realizing that he didn’t have enough coins to do his laundry was an indignation.

So he calls backup, and now it’s the dead of night and it’s two boys in a laundromat and it’s Dick and Wally, best friends forever, something like that. Scene set. Promise it won’t change again.

Wally yawns. It stretches so large that his jaw cracks. He covers his mouth, but the movement is sluggish, slow. Dick, from where he’s looking up at Wally, gets a pretty good view of the top of his mouth before his hand blocks it.  _ Gross, _ he thinks.

“Sorry for calling you out so late,” he says. 

Wally waves his hand. “It’s fine,” he says, blinking slowly. “I was up anyway. Studying and shit. You know how it is.”

Actually, Dick doesn’t, because he’s a part-time student in a cosy liberal arts college in New York, and Wally is completing a post-grad in molecular physics and stuck deep into his final thesis. Dick knows the outline of how it goes, sure, but his personal preference of poison has always strayed towards things like fighting crime or late-night television. He hasn’t done the university related all-nighter yet. Hopefully will never have to.

“You look dead on your feet, man,” Dick says. He shifts a little. Rolls his weight off of a bruise that’s beginning to form on his shoulder, but it doesn’t really help. As it turns out, washing machines aren’t all that comfortable. Everyone witnessing this is shocked and appalled at this discovery, surely.

Wally smiles and begins to run his fingers through Dick’s hair. It has the unfortunate affect of making Dick immediately sleepy, which is bad because he still has to achieve things tonight like taking his laundry out of the machine and putting it into the basket and walking back to his apartment. And maybe making Wally breakfast, as a combined  _ sorry _ and  _ thank you. _

“Who’s the one literally lying down in the laundromat right now?” Wally asks. 

Dick hums sleepily. On second thought, he could also not attempt to achieve any of those things, and instead pass out here and now. Wally is very warm. Chalk it up to speedster biology, something like that. He’s basically a furnace, and New York winters can bite.

“Could be both of us.”

Wally considers that. 

In the time he pauses, that one light flickers.

“You’re kind of a genius, you know that?” says Wally.

Dick grins. “So I’ve been told,”

Dick moves over to make space, and Wally promptly lies the fuck down. He groans happily. Again, it’s  _ not _ comfortable, but world-weary heroes and ex-heroes and not-quite-done-being heroes make do. Besides. It’s about the comfort of friendship. Something like that. 

“I love being horizontal,” Wally sighs. “It’s been so long,”

Dick rolls his eyes. He moves off of his back and onto his shoulder again, bruise be damned. It’s just one of many of many of many; he’s always been the type to press on his wounds anyway. Just to see how much they would hurt. 

He tucks his hands underneath his face, though. Making some vague grasp at comfort.

Dick takes a better look at Wally now, his side-profile illuminated by what must be the worst lighting in the entirety of America. Because Wally is a stunning, stand-up, good friend, he magnanimously allows Dick stare. Either that, or he’s too tired to look back. Whatever. The point is that Dick stares, and Wally lets him.

There are smudges underneath Wally’s eyes. Lines in his brow. A crack in his lip.

“Seriously,” Dick says, “you look like shit.”

Wally turns his head to meet Dick’s eyes. They both wince at the way his neck cracks during the movement.

Rubbing at his neck, Wally says, “There goes my argument. But let me ask: you looked in the mirror lately, Dick Grayson?”

“No,” Dick replies, rolling his eyes. “I’ve been avoiding my reflection like a humble Amish housewife, lest the devil tempt me with vanity and glamour. I know  _ I _ look like shit, Wally, but this isn’t about me, dickhead. It’s about  _ you.” _

“Wow,” Wally says, grinning. “That was kinda romantic.”

Dick’s tempted to shove Wally off of the washing machines. Much like in Star Wars, or Naruto, or some other media that deals heavily with inner power and such, he summons the self-restraint to not do so.

“You’re ridiculous,” Dick informs Wally, poking him in the chest. 

“So I’ve been told,” Wally replies.

“Hey, you two,” comes a completely new voice.

Dick and Wally both look in the direction of the sound.

Perspective pivot: the person working at the counter is standing up now. They have their arms crossed. 

Standing up, it’s obvious that they’re younger than both Dick and Wally, and isn’t that a thought? That they’re the older generation now? It’s a  _ thing, _ with the Titans, you see: deep deep down all of them still feel like the young upstarts, the up-and-comings, the shiny bright future. There’s several generations of heroes—it’s another tragedy altogether that  _ that’s  _ how they’re measuring the time—underneath them now, but when it’s the Teen Titans together or any combination thereof, it always feels like those early days: five snot-nosed kids in the trees outside Wayne Manor, dreaming of the world.

The employee, looking for lack of better phrasing absolutely motherfucking dead inside, asks, “How long left in your cycle?”

Dick and Wally look at the washing machine on the opposite wall to them.

“17 minutes,” Dick replies.

“Brilliant,” the employee says. They sit back down. “I’m going to take a 15 minute powernap. Please make sure nobody breaks in, and the place doesn’t burn down. Thank you.”

With that, they cross their arms in front of them on the counter, and lay their head down.

Dick and Wally look back at each other.

Thus begins the most stifled, desperately silent giggle session that the world has ever witnessed. It’s the kind of laughing that you forget you can do, laughing that fills up the chest and can’t  _ help _ but spill out, and it’s made all the better by the fact that they legally have to stay quiet. The law in question being the unspoken one of overworked university students, which includes rules like  _ take care of people’s things in the library when they go to the toilet _ and  _ if you see someone sleeping mind your damn business.  _ Seeing Wally go red from the effort of holding in his laughter just makes Dick laugh harder.

When they finally, finally calm down, what follows after is quiet. Even New York, the riot that she is, can’t find the energy to be loud at this hour of the morning. Neither can Dick or Wally, it seems. Their breathing evens, smooths out into silence. It feels like an almost overwhelmingly large admission, this silence. Some terrible acknowledgement of how hard it’s been.

Because it has been. And here is the problem, here is the root and the heart and the bud: Dick just doesn’t know how to say it aloud. It’s ridiculous, really, because these problems are so fucking mundane—it feels like it should be a privilege, a  _ relief, _ to stress over things like homework and job applications and how much laundry he can carry at once, instead of things like the world ending or resurrection or losing his family. But it doesn’t. It feels exactly the same. Different problems but same old Dick. He’s just as tired and just as overworked, even if he’s learned to love the littler things; slowing down doesn’t mean shit if your heart beats fast all the same.

The light flickers.

Wally says, “Man, you think  _ way _ too hard about things.”

Dick blinks at him. “What things?” he asks. “You don’t know what I’m thinking about.”

“I can see it in your eyes, Rob. Your brain works overtime.”

“Not like I can just turn it off.”

Wally sits up. He tugs on Dick’s arm.

Half-heartedly, Dick sits up too.

“Here,” Wally says, cupping Dick’s face in his hands, “let me show you. Close your eyes.”

Dick nods as best as he can, trapped by Wally’s warm palms. He does as he’s told.

Wally runs his thumbs under Dick’s eyes. Then, he gently runs them over Dick’s eyelids. He traces Dick’s crown, and then cards fingers through his hair. 

“Breathe in. Breathe out. Try to focus on a sound.”

Back under the eyes. Eyelids. Crown. Hair.

Dick’s shoulders droop. It’s a good start, but Dick’s brain is a difficult beast to tame. He tries to hone in on one particular sound like Wally says, but listening to the chugchugchug of his laundry just makes him think about getting it back home which makes him think about having to start his day which makes him think about how much work he has to do which—

“Okay,” Wally, who is proving eerily observant, announces, removing his hands from Dick’s face. “This isn’t working,”

Dick offers Wally a smile. “Sorry?”

Wally rolls his eyes, but pats Dick on the head, so Dick knows he’s not mad.

“It’s fine,” Wally replies. “I should’ve known the things normal people do to relax don’t work on you,”

“Hey, the face massage was nice. I’m just not good at… not doing things.”

Eyes will roll, a famous singer once said—or was that heads?—and so Wally’s eyes do roll. He pulls something out of the pocket of his basketball shorts, which have been tastefully layered over some leggings, and thrusts it at Dick.

Dick squints at whatever’s being offered to him. It seems to be some bundle of bright pink material.

“Is that wool?” he asks.

Wally shrugs, and drops the bundle of wool into Dick’s lap. “My housemate’s been knitting as a hobby, but our dog keeps messing up his wool. He’s forced all of the untangling onto me, because for some miraculous reason that has absolutely no explanation, I can do it very quickly.”

Dick picks up the tangle of wool. He looks at it. There are some places that are fraying, and it’s a hopeless mess.

He looks at Wally.

“You want me to untangle wool?”

Wally shrugs. “It’s pretty calming. Try it.”

To be honest, Dick’s fingers are already itching to pull apart some of those knots, so he figures why not. He begins to pick at the tangles, trying to find an end to the mess.

As he does, Wally shuffles around so that they aren’t facing each other anymore, but are sitting adjacent. He leans onto Dick’s shoulder. He pulls out his phone and starts to play some music.

“Is that Spanish?” Dick asks, concentration not leaving the wool in his hands.

“Yup,” Wally replies.

Dick nods. It’s nice enough. His Spanish is pretty good, but rusty enough that he’d have to tune in pretty hard to pick out what the singer is saying. Surprisingly, this is a benefit; it’s easier for him to tune out the music, but still have it adding to the background noise.

Wally taps away at his phone, reading something or another, tabbing between his games. Dick untangles the wool. He’s found one of the ends now, and has begun to roll it into a ball. His fingers aren’t quite familiar with the motion, so he stumbles a fair bit, but it is… calming.

It’s very calming. Dick hates it when Wally is right. Or he would, if he wasn’t so immersed in untangling this wool.

And so the time passes. It’s an idyllic scene, though it’s not as though laundromats tend to be all that chaotic. Dick slowly forms more and more of the ball. Wally is a constant warmth and weight next to him. And with every breath, he can feel it leaving him—leaving them  _ both. _ Some of the tension drains from his wound-up body. Wally, next to him, snuggles deeper into the fabric of his sweatshirt.

The world is quiet. The world, for fucking once, doesn’t hurt.

Dick closes his eyes, and leans against Wally more.

“Hey,” he says. “Sorry I called you out so late.”

Wally nudges his shoulder gently. “It’s nothing, Rob. I’m glad you did.”

**Author's Note:**

> psa if u have adhd. go out and buy some wool. come home and fucking ditch it at your walls. at your laptop. at your tv. at your bed. wherever. it's fucking wool. once it's been unravelled from all this throwing around, sit down and remake the ball. trust me. coping 101


End file.
